“I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t mean to.” Almost a whisper. “That’s the problem.”
Evan made a noise that wasn’t a word. His fingers curled on the table, scraping the wood, and his head dropped forward, chin to chest. Finn looked at the top of Evan’s head and the silver at his temples and the way his shoulders were shaking and he held himself in his chair with every muscle in his body because if he reached across the table and touched Evan right now he would take it all back, and he couldn’t take it back, because taking it back meant going on like this and going on like this was killing him by inches.
Finn stood up. “I’m not angry. I just can’t keep doing this.”
Finn walked to the entrance and opened it. The corridor air was cooler, carrying the faint smell of the neighbor’s cooking and the hum of the elevator somewhere below.
Evan stood. The chair scraped. Evan crossed the apartment in steps that landed heavily and stopped in the doorway with his fingers pressed into the frame. His lips were open. His gaze was wet, the fluorescent light from the corridor caught it, and Finn received it without looking away.
Evan walked out. He didn’t say goodbye. Finn closed the entrance.
Finn stood with his palm on the knob. The apartment behind him, the corridor on the other side, the coffee on the table that neither of them had finished. His throat was raw, his ribs ached, and he held the knob for a long moment.
10
EVAN
Evan’s mother opened the entrance before he knocked.
“You look thin.”
“I’m not thin.”
“You’re not eating.” She stepped aside. “Come in before the cold gets in the house.”
Evan wasn’t thin. He had eaten lunch. He had eaten lunch because he always ate lunch, at his desk, a sandwich from the break room refrigerator that he chewed and swallowed while reading scout reports. He was eating. He was functioning. He was a functioning adult who went to work and compiled reports and answered emails and had not once, in the past week, pulled into Finn Holloway’s parking lot and sat there with the engine running, so he was handling it.
He was handling it the way he handled everything. Keep moving. Don’t look down.
The kitchen smelled like garlic and roasted chicken. His mother had set the table with the linen napkins. The green beans were in the white dish with the chipped rim she wouldn’t throw away. Evan sat in his chair, the one with the uneven leg that had been uneven since he was in high school and that his mother kept promising to fix and never did, and she put food in front of him and he picked up his fork.
She talked about Claire’s week. About the neighbor’s renovation, which had gone over budget and was producing noise complaints that she relayed with the satisfaction of someone whose house was not the one being renovated. About a documentary on bridge engineering his father had paused three times to explain to her. Evan cut his chicken into pieces and arranged them on his plate and could not taste a single bite. He kept chewing because chewing was a thing his jaw knew how to do without his brain’s involvement, and right now his brain was not available.
His brain was in a truck with fogged windows, replaying the way Finn had kissed him after. Gentle. Too gentle. Like a question Evan hadn’t known to answer.
“You seem off tonight,” his mother said.
“I’m always off.”
“Different off.”
She had her chin on her palm. She was looking at him the way she’d been looking at him since he was sixteen and came home from a party with his shirt buttoned wrong. She had never once asked him to confess. She just sat there and waited until the silence did her work for her.
“I’m fine,” Evan said.
She went to her plate.
Evan reached for his water glass. His grip shook. The water sloshed and he set it down fast and put his fist in his lap. The same fist that had been rock-solid in his father’s office. Perfectlysteady when it needed to be. Shaking now, over a plate of chicken, because this was his mother’s kitchen and he’d never had to fake anything here.
She saw. She set her fork down and picked up her wine glass and turned the stem between her fingers and didn’t say a word. The clock on the wall above the stove ticked. The oven was cooling, the metal contracting in small clicks. His mother waited the way she always waited: without expectation, without pressure, just space held open for whatever was going to come out of him.
“I made a mistake,” Evan said. His throat was tight. “I’m handling it.”
“Okay.”
That was it. Justokay.The same word Finn had given him in the kitchen that first morning, his coffee cooling in his mug, his shirt buttoned wrong. Except his mother meant it the way mothers meant it:I’m here when you’re ready.
